Keep Moving Forward
This is a free post on the topic of writing. In the future, most of my posts on writing will most likely be for paid subscribers. If you would like to receive weekly posts on the process of writing, please consider subscribing.
I’ve written before about the need to break down big writing projects into smaller units. Don’t try to write a book all in one day; that doesn’t happen. Instead, work on it little by little. Be consistent. Aim to hit your daily word counts.
That also means it’s important to keep moving forward. Keep writing, even if you don’t feel like it.
When you’re writing, you don’t always feel like tackling a big topic. You may not have a lot of steam every day you sit down (or stand up) in front of your keyboard. You may not think the insights or words you’re putting down that day are profound.
Keep moving forward. Don’t stagnate. If you take too much time off, it’s hard to pick back up and remember where you were and what you were going to say next.
To keep moving forward means you put words down on the page every day. Even if it’s not entirely polished. Even if it’s just notes you need to come back to and edit. Every little bit you do helps. Put something down on the page. And the more you do this, the more you’ll find you’re making progress toward the final product.
In fact, you may find that the more you keep moving forward, the more the project begins to take shape, even though you did not write anything you considered to be profound or polished.
And you may find that the more you keep moving forward, the more fluff you can excise. It may be that you determine that big hill you had to climb (that is, a difficult topic or passage) turns out to be unnecessary and you don’t need to address it. That might save you hours. But you wouldn’t know that unless you’d kept moving forward.
So my encouragement today is to keep moving forward each day. Write something. Even if it’s little by little. Don’t stagnate in your writing. Every little bit helps, and the small steps taken consistently add up over the long haul.
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